The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment, and Protest

Preface

My earliest childhood memory is of a train ride. Standing in the aisle, barely able to reach the worn armrests on either side, I lift myself, swinging back and forth to the rhythm of the moving train. The air is hot and musty. My brother Kiyoshi is curled asleep, his head across my mother’s lap. The man beside her is a stranger to me. My mother has told me to call him Otō-chan, Daddy. When I cry, he says to me softly, Shikkari shinasai. Nakanai de. Be strong. Don’t cry.

I was born on May 25, 1944, in the Tule Lake Segregation Center, a maximum-security prison camp in Northern California, during World War II. When I was a year old, my father was taken from us and held in a separate prison in North Dakota. Finally reunited, after more than four years of prison life for my parents, we were leaving the Crystal City, Texas, family internment camp by train on July 9, 1946. Our destination held an uncertain promise. I had only known life surrounded by barbed-wire fences.

Almost eight decades have passed since that defining moment of American history when over 125,000 people of Japanese ancestry, citizen and immigrant alike, living on the West Coast of the US, were forced from their homes and imprisoned in American concentration camps, euphemistically referred to as relocation centers. By executive order, Franklin Delano Roosevelt would deny American citizens the civil liberties guaranteed by the US Constitution, to be considered innocent until proven guilty.

Someday my grandchildren will learn that their great-grandparents, Shizuko and Itaru Ina, were taken from their home in San Francisco and forcefully held in six different prison camps from 1942 to 1946. Sadly, they may also hear that their great-grandparents were disloyal to America. It’s a message I heard in muffled voices when people learned that I was born in the prison camp for traitors and troublemakers. My father’s frozen silence about our time in camp added to the shame that I unwittingly absorbed. When I asked my parents why people would say those things, my mother deftly put the problem aside and said, Just say that you were born in Newell, California. I followed her advice, referring to the little town just outside the prison, but the question was never answered, and like a fly unable to escape from a windowless room, it bumped around in my head for years until somewhere along the way, it stopped—curiosity withered, rerouted, without answers.

In 1994, I joined a pilgrimage to the Tule Lake prison site to commemorate my fiftieth birthday, and as if waking from a decades-long hibernation, the questions came back to life with a fury. What silenced my parents? What secrets were so painful they had to be suppressed? What choices did my parents make? Why am I so haunted by these questions?

By this time, my father was gone and my mother was showing early signs of dementia. I had been a psychotherapist specializing in the treatment of trauma for over twenty years. To understand the psychological trauma of the mass incarceration that seemed to haunt me and other former captives, especially at Tule Lake, I began by researching files in the National Archives. I went on to interview former incarcerees, and eventually conducted more than 110 group therapy sessions with people who, like me, were children in the camps. After five years of holding a series of Children of the Camps workshops with Japanese Americans who were incarcerated as children, I produced a documentary film, Children of the Camps (2000), with the help of my niece, Kim Ina, and a crew of professional filmmakers.

It was my hope that when former child prisoners observed people in the film revealing their stories and emotions, they would be encouraged to see the benefits of doing the same. Adults who suffered trauma as children often suppress their own direct experience and internalize the narrative of the perpetrator, who, with unlimited power over the bodies and minds of their victims, can distort the truth about the how and why. The kaleidoscopic stories of the Japanese American experience during World War II had been shamefully suppressed by the US government to avoid bringing to light the violation of our constitutional rights. Our artificially distilled narrative had become a typical perpetrator-informed story that blamed the victim. Justification for the mass incarceration was based on race rather than due process, and loyalty had become the onus of the victim to prove, after they had already been incarcerated. It was a difficult and often painful process to separate out the real stories from the false internalized stories, and to unearth deeply held emotions of sorrow and rage, especially in the face of the almost universal silence that was a predictable coping response of the traumatized adult victims.

This profound uncovering process brought to light aspects of the World War II incarceration story that I had never heard or read about. Before the war, Japanese Americans were not forced to see themselves as either loyal or disloyal. Most first-generation immigrants had been living in the US for decades, committed to raising children who were American-born citizens. Slowly, the false narratives were carved away as group participants sifted through their own stories, corroborating memories and facts to find previously unspeakable humiliation, tragic losses, deep faith, sacrifice, love, angst, and both large and small acts of dissidence.

Finally, after I completed the Children of the Camps documentary, it was time for me to excavate my own family story. I learned from the people who shared in the workshops that family secrets have a way of disconnecting people from their past, often shaping the relationships between parents and their children. A vague sense of anxiety was ever present in my childhood. It wasn’t a secret that we had been in camp, but my parents hardly spoke about their wartime experience. Somehow, I knew it was best not to ask questions, thus joining not only my family and my community but society at large in keeping the story of our incarceration stowed away out of awareness, a festering wound, never to heal.

Fear, rather than hope, seemed to drive my parents’ desire for us to be successful in the world—to be good students, to behave, to excel in whatever we undertook, and not to bring shame to the family. There was frequently a sense of foreboding when one of us kids would step off the mark and go in a direction that wasn’t part of the plan—foreboding so present that all three of us, my brothers and I, would quickly reverse course, avoid risks, and above all else, seek safety and approval.

Something kept my parents, and possibly my entire community, from speaking about the camps. This something, I believe now, had to do with a deep sense of shame. Shame so choking that it would prevent my mother and father from speaking up when they were shortchanged in a store, spoken to rudely, ignored in restaurants, called racist names, spit on. Shame that was passed down to us children about who we were, how we looked, and what we deserved in life. We learned not to complain, to avoid being vulnerable, and to bear a never-ending need to strive for approval. Mental and emotional toughness was what it would take to endure whatever life brought our way. Looking back now, I realize how my father’s repeated message to me, Be strong. Don’t cry, reflected the fortitude that made it possible for my parents to survive the trauma of their incarceration. For me, it would become both the strength and the weakness in my ability to cope with my own life challenges.

Learning about my parents’ wartime experience would lead me on a healing journey that would change my life forever. After my father passed away in 1977, my mother and I were sorting through his large, weathered oak desk, where he often sat to compose his poetry. When I reached into the back of the bottom drawer, I discovered a large packet of letters, neatly stacked and tied together with rough brown twine. My mother seemed stunned when I handed the packet to her. As she slowly shuffled the letters in her hands, tears formed in her eyes. She sank to the floor beside me. I didn’t know Daddy saved my letters from camp, she said. She circled her finger around the room, Somewhere around here are the letters he sent to me.

In the moment, I felt a rush of excitement about the discovery, but when my mother, without hesitation, handed the small bundle back to me without untying the string, I realized that the letters held more than just reminders of past times. They were artifacts of ghostly memories suddenly brought to life. Like the silence that haunted our home, they represented a door she chose not to reopen. She never said what she thought I should do with the letters, but within days, she had unearthed the corresponding mail she received from my dad during that same time period, put both bundles in a neatly wrapped box, and never mentioned them again.

I carried this box around with me for more than twenty years, moving it from place to place, packing and unpacking it, often forgetting it even existed. The letters were mostly written in Japanese, and I sometimes wondered what it would feel like to be able to just open and read each one. But not being able to read or write in Japanese was in some ways a protective guard against knowing what my parents might have endured during their incarceration.

Besides these prison camp letters, earlier ones written during their courtship before the war, along with photographs, diaries, and my father’s haiku journals, were waiting to be found in boxes in my mother’s apartment. Before she passed away I asked if I could have her permission to make a documentary film about our family story. She shrugged, saying there wasn’t much to tell, but kodomo no tame ni (for the sake of the children), as well as for other survivors of the World War II Japanese American experience, she consented. It was the impetus I needed to begin to face the letters sitting in the box. Five years later, in 2005, along with the same amazing team that worked with me on Children of the Camps, I produced a docudrama broadcast on PBS called From a Silk Cocoon. It took several years to translate, research, gather, and connect the jagged pieces of a historical puzzle. Slowly, piece by piece, with the help of my parents’ letters and diaries, as well as government documents from 1939 through 1946, their story unfolded before me. I was soon to discover that our family story would not be a part of the dominant narrative about the so-called relocation and evacuation of Japanese Americans, in which the only way to prove one’s loyalty was by silently accepting government-perpetrated injustice.

It has been twenty-five years since I began this personal journey to uncover, make meaning of, and heal from a trauma that occurred before I was born. The intergenerational transmission of trauma has been the subject of great controversy. How does one tie symptoms of emotional distress to events that occurred in a previous generation? What behaviors and messages were passed on to me, consciously or unconsciously, that I have internalized yet cannot make sense of from within my own life experience? Is there more than just my own direct experience with racism that could explain my reactivity to shame, exclusion, and othering?

In my quest, I have turned many times to the work of Dr. Judith Herman, whose writing and research have informed and inspired my own work on the impact of collective historical trauma. It hasn’t been easy to write this book about my family’s incarceration experience during World War II. Dr. Herman’s words in her 1997 book Trauma and Recovery have helped me to stay committed to the task at hand: Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims. If healing from trauma, as Herman posits, can be achieved by remembering and telling the truth about terrible events, this story is about my search for personal healing. If it also helps to make possible a restoration of the social order, a community claiming its own narrative, then it is at the very least a necessary endeavor.

I spent most of my career as a psychotherapist applying the traditional micro approach of individual therapy. More recently, in the past ten years, I have—out of frustration over seeing the constant and massive impact of chronic states of trauma inflicted by personal and systemic racism—shifted to a more macro approach to intervention, joining other social justice therapists whose clinical interventions have shifted to community interventions. No longer able to ignore the societal context in which many of my clients, particularly clients of color, suffer common psychological symptoms of distress, I have found it essential to examine and bring into the therapy exchange the systems in which the trauma has been perpetrated. This expanded perspective has led me from my comfortable private-practice office to prisons where Central American women and children have been indefinitely incarcerated, to churches where years of clergy sexual abuse was suppressed, and to pilgrimages where Japanese American survivors of World War II American concentration camps gather for healing.

The forced removal and incarceration of thousands of people of Japanese ancestry during World War II was an aggressive act of oppression legitimized as military necessity. History has shown that there was, in fact, no basis for claiming that people of Japanese heritage living on the West Coast were a risk to national security. Economic and political motives, as well as racist rhetoric inciting hate, were the strategies implemented by a leadership that took the country off course from its professed democratic principles.

Oppression by mass incarceration of an entire community first required the dehumanizing of the targeted people with propaganda that fostered feelings of threat to the dominant society. West Coast Japanese immigrant farmers and fishermen, using traditional methods of their trades along with the diligence and hard work characteristic of immigrants, were seen to pose a threat to the established white agricultural and fishing industries in the Central Valley and coastal waters. Powerful segments of US social, political, and economic sectors pressed for their removal. The othering of Japanese Americans as unassimilable, disloyal, potential spies and saboteurs made it justifiable to the majority of the American public to have people of Japanese ancestry disappeared from their homes, farms, and classrooms.

Victims of oppression suffer long-term psychological consequences resulting from deprivation, loss of agency, and humiliation that endure for decades, even generations, after the trauma was first inflicted. Almost eighty years after the government released Japanese Americans from up to six years of confinement with only $25 and a one-way ticket, survivors and their descendants are still unwinding the distorted narrative that was used to justify their imprisonment. In my own journey, I have found that uncovering and reconstructing the true narrative, remembering and claiming our family stories, are necessary for our personal and family healing and for the healing of our community.

Community-focused programs can empower victims to discover their own history, culture, and language, and to organize and educate their communities by sharing their stories. Through their art, writing, speaking, and performing, victims become dissidents actively resisting and ultimately replacing the shame and silencing of the perpetrator’s narrative with the clarity of purpose to write their own.

When I first began writing and editing this book, I thought it would be enough to tell the story of my family’s experience during our World War II incarceration by publishing a collection of primary resources—letters, diaries, photographs, and poetry that, for the most part, came to light after both of my parents had passed away. But after years of delving into the details of the contextual history and wrestling with my own emotions in the process, I was forced by the gentle but insistent prodding from my editors to see the importance of including my own voice in this story. Attempting to avoid my presence in this book was a symptom of my own trauma, a kind of intellectual dissociation, a self-imposed silencing. Learning to break that silence has not been an easy transition.

Only after years of working on this project did I fully realize that telling this story, in all its truth and life, would require not just facts and documents but, more important, a deep empathy for my parents. My avoidance after all these years was a cover for the unconscious fear that the pain of their experience would be more than I could bear.

It took years after my parents passed away before I was ready to find somebody to help me unlock the story that lay silenced in the box in my closet. Although I had used some of the letters and diary entries in my research for From a Silk Cocoon, most of the material still remained untranslated. But having decided to move forward, I still had to wait several more years before I would cross paths with the perfect translator, someone I could trust to walk with me through this emotionally uncertain terrain. Iko Miyazaki, a graduate student in the Marriage and Family Counseling program where I was teaching at California State University, Sacramento, was from Kyoto, Japan. Having lived and studied in the US for several years, she had a strong background in psychology, exceptional bilingual skills, and a unique sensitivity to and understanding of Japanese culture and history. She was gentle, kind, and caring, conscious of how vulnerable the project made me feel.

It seemed to me almost magical as she carefully unfolded each letter and began simultaneously reading the letters in Japanese and translating each of my parents’ words into English, slowly revealing what had seemed to me unknowable parts of my parents’ lives. Iko went beyond direct word-for-word translation, articulating the nuanced tone and unspoken meanings deeply buried in the Japanese language.

While she translated my parents’ words from Japanese, I contextualized the history, the personal characteristics of my parents, and the circumstances in which the letters were embedded. Together, over the course of two years, we cotranslated more than 180 letters and diary entries that spanned the war years of 1941 to 1946.

I had initially approached the task at hand with my skill for fending off emotions and getting the job done. My goal was simply to remove the language barrier that kept me from knowing my parents’ story. Just a few days into our work, however, I would learn there was so much more waiting to be known.

As I busily typed the words she translated into English, Iko suddenly stopped speaking and grew quiet. I glanced over to see tears streaming down her face. She had been deeply moved by my mother’s account of the day of her removal. My response shocked both of us, as a flash of intense anger rushed through me. I leaned over to her, and with the urgency of thwarting danger, I raised my voice, echoing my father’s childhood directive to me: Be strong. Don’t cry!

Iko’s tears were my tears. In that uncanny moment of my outburst, a switch was tripped. As if I were roused from a dream, the sadness and longing, feelings I had deeply buried from awareness for most of my life, rose painfully to the surface. Ungrounded and flustered, we returned to translating a letter my father wrote while imprisoned miles away from his wife and children. As I am writing to you, it read, a single autumn leaf has floated down by my window. Iko and I both spontaneously turned to see a single red maple leaf floating slowly past the window of my office. In that moment, we could not hold back the tears.

From that moment forward, as we worked together, we freely cried and laughed and raged. I had entered my mother and father’s world, but more important, I had allowed them into mine. Through this long and often arduous process, Iko became my compassionate witness, a dear friend and fellow traveler who stood with me to look back at the trauma that previously had no words. Empathic and without judgment, she would come to know me in ways no others would.

It was often a tedious yet lively triangular exchange between my parents, Iko, and me. Two specific strategies became essential. Iko was able to expertly translate Japanese into standard English, but I had to adjust the translation within the context of the setting. For example, what might be translated in standard English as dining hall was more accurately described as mess hall, or bathroom as latrine. A second strategy was to clarify the emotional tone of a message. On occasion, the Japanese-to-English translation sounded flat when in fact, the situation being addressed was quite intense and stressful. Iko and I had to negotiate the level of intensity intended in segments of the letters and diaries and poems—is he angry here or just solemn? Is she panicked or just calmly making a request? We found that our cultural orientation influenced how we perceived the writings. Iko, my parents, and the Japanese language tended to be more emotionally restrained, while my more westernized psychologist’s perspective led me to question the flatness of the emotions conveyed in Iko’s choice of English words. After rigorous discussion, we’d always confirm that what we settled on stayed consistent with what was expressed in Japanese.

Throughout the process, we often had to take time to research or find experts in Japan who could make meaning of some of the archaic kanji characters, or figure out the katakana (phonetic characters used specifically for non-Japanese words). In one letter written during a particularly harrowing period of time, my mother uses katakana to ask my dad whether he needs a rokuki. Only by taking time to study the context and circumstance were we able to figure out that she was asking about a lock and key. The knife cuts of the censors slicing through the letters made communication between my parents unpredictable and sometimes incomprehensible. Over time they developed secret code words to get around the restrictions, which often left Iko and me befuddled.

My parents had to rely on language and labels imposed by the authorities, terminology that distorted the reality of what they were describing. In their letters and diary entries, they referred to their forced arrest and removal as evacuation, their unlawful deportation as American citizens repatriation. Although it was painful to witness the manipulation of language used to minimize the travesty of their incarceration, we stayed true to the terminology my parents used.

If what Dr. Herman states is true—You cannot understand the victim until you understand the perpetrator, and to understand the perpetrator you have to understand the political and intellectual climate of the time—then writing this book is just the beginning of the work that lies ahead for me, and facing our collective history is just the beginning for my community and my country.

I grew up knowing very little about my parents’ World War II experience. Like others who had resisted and protested the injustice, they had been shamed into silence. Over their four years of captivity, my parents lived under assigned labels that created boundaries and definitions of who they were, what they did, and how they would be treated. By birthright they were American citizens, but the war would justify their removal as non-aliens; their demand for civil rights would render them disloyals; they would respond with despair as renunciants; and ultimately they would be designated enemy aliens subject to deportation.

The dominant narrative that shaped my limited understanding was promoted by the perpetrator of the injustice, our American government. It was a narrative that was, at the time, perpetuated by leaders of the Japanese American Citizens League and community leaders whose intent was to curry favor with the authorities by accommodating their demands and urging Japanese Americans to prove their loyalty by abiding by government restrictions and regulations rather than challenging the unlawful mass incarceration. Simple dualities of loyal or disloyal, good guys or bad guys have led to fractures in our community that remain today. It is my intent to recount my family story, absent the euphemistic language and self-serving lens imposed by government authorities to distort and disguise the truth. My hope is that through my parents’ first-person accounts of their World War II incarceration, readers will experience not only the reality but also the humanity of the many whose voices have been silenced.

As a psychotherapist specializing in the treatment of trauma, I had to write this book with an analytic eye toward not just my parents’ perspective, decisions, and actions but my own as well. The intergenerational transmission of trauma has been a lived experience for me. Writing, researching, and attending to my parents’ written words and my memories of growing up with them has been a journey of healing for me. Their strength and determination to survive a major trauma that didn’t end after their unjust incarceration have also served to inform my work with the intergenerational trauma that has permeated the lives of many families, Japanese American and otherwise.

I hope that this story, one of 125,284 stories, will give dignity to all those who found ways to protest and resist the dehumanizing trauma and staggering injustice of the World War II mass incarceration of Japanese Americans. Perhaps it can inform and, more important, inspire those who are protesting cruel and unjust incarceration today.

1.

American Citizens

It was the end of March 2000. My mother’s favorite wisteria blossoms were beginning to show off their radiant purple hues. Her eulogy had just been given, recounting how she met my father when she came to the US to represent Japan’s silk industry at the 1939 World’s Fair. The Buddhist minister, with his black robes and shiny, balding head, leaned forward to my brothers and me and whispered, So, if it were not for the silk cocoon, you wouldn’t be sitting here today.

I realized in that moment how little I really knew about either of my parents’ lives before their children became the center of their universe. I knew of the major events that brought them to San Francisco, but not the fine-grain moments and emotions that likely spilled over into the person I had become.

As I tried to remember the stories my parents shared with me about their childhoods, I found I could only recall them in short wisps of memory—ephemeral yet incandescent. Their stories were not stored in my brain as a linear, detailed narrative, but more as emotional glimpses held like vibrant butterflies caught in a net. When I sat down to write about their lives as children, I could only describe what felt like precious memories of their memories fluttering out in poetic rhythm, each with a life of its own.

In her tiny apartment, my mother surrounded herself